In brief
- A Shopify Plus agency service ranges from €30,000 to €120,000 for a complete project, excluding the platform license. The median for projects we frame is around €55,000.
- The daily rate for a Shopify Plus agency in France ranges from €550 to €950 depending on the profile mobilized, with a weighted average around €700 for a mixed design, development, and project management project.
- The difference between two quotes rarely comes from the daily rate: it comes from the scope. A quote for €38,000 and a quote for €90,000 almost never describe the same project.
- Three items significantly increase a Plus budget: ERP or PIM integration, B2B with account-specific price lists, and deep checkout customization.
- Below €1M in revenue and without a specific functional need, the additional cost of a Plus agency is not justified. We tell this to our prospects before quoting.
Are you looking to budget for a Shopify Plus project and finding pages that talk about the license price, but never the cost of the agency that will build the site? These are two distinct budget lines, and the latter is the heavier one in the first year. For the cost of the platform itself, our complete Shopify Plus guide details the subscription and revenue-based billing model. This page deals only with the rest: what the service costs.
We are a certified Shopify Plus Partner agency and have had the opportunity to work on all the functional components of the ecosystem: checkout customization via Checkout Extensibility, integrated B2B sales channel with catalogs and account-specific pricing, Shopify Functions, Flow automations, ERP connections. The ranges that follow come from genuinely framed and delivered projects, not from a marketing grid.
Summary
What a Shopify Plus agency service really covers
A Shopify Plus agency service covers the human work of designing and building the site: functional framing, information architecture, journey design, theme development, Plus feature configuration, third-party integrations, data migration, testing, and launch. This is human-days, billed as a fixed price or on a time-and-materials basis.
What the service does not cover: the platform subscription, payment processing fees, and third-party application licenses. These three items are billed directly by Shopify and by the publishers; they are outside the agency's quote.
The confusion between these two lines is the primary source of misunderstanding in sales meetings. A brand that has a global budget of €60,000 in mind and discovers during the project that the license is added on top quickly becomes stressed. We systematically separate the two in our proposals, with a twelve-month projection that combines service, license, and applications.
Budget ranges by project type
Here are the five most common configurations we encounter, with the observed service ranges. These amounts correspond to a project led by a French agency, excluding license and applications.
| Project Type | Typical Scope | Service Range | Duration | Team Mobilized |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greenfield Plus creation | Custom design, custom theme, new catalog, Flow, Launchpad | €45,000 to €90,000 | 10 to 16 weeks | Project manager, designer, 2 developers |
| Migration from standard Shopify | Theme reuse, Plus feature activation, redirects, testing | €30,000 to €55,000 | 6 to 9 weeks | Project manager, 1 to 2 developers, SEO specialist |
| Enterprise migration (SFCC, SAP, Magento) | Catalog and customer import, complete redesign, integrations, heavy redirect plan | €80,000 to €180,000 | 14 to 24 weeks | Full team, including backend and data profiles |
| B2B Plus implementation | Native B2B channel, account-specific catalogs, price lists, payment terms | €25,000 to €60,000 | 6 to 12 weeks | Project manager, Functions developer, business specialist |
| Headless / Hydrogen | Decoupled React frontend, Storefront APIs, dedicated hosting, design system | €60,000 to €150,000 | 12 to 20 weeks | Lead frontend, backend developer, designer, project manager |
A useful benchmark: across all Plus projects we frame, the median service cost is around €55,000. Projects under €30,000 exist, but they almost always correspond to a deliberately reduced scope, for example, a technical migration without visual redesign. Beyond €120,000, we move from a single project to a multi-year program.
The B2B item deserves a note. Many brands underestimate it because Shopify Plus advertises it as native. Native does not mean free in terms of implementation time: modeling price lists, tiered discount logic, and payment terms alone account for 15 to 30 human-days on an average project. Our Shopify B2B guide details what the native channel covers and what needs to be built.
Daily rates and billing models
The average daily rate for a French Shopify Plus agency is between €550 and €950 excluding VAT, depending on the profile. Here is the rate by profession, as found in the Parisian market in 2026.
| Profile | Observed Daily Rate | Typical Share of a Plus Project |
|---|---|---|
| Liquid / Theme Developer | €550 to €750 | 35 to 45% |
| Backend / Shopify Functions Developer | €700 to €950 | 10 to 25% |
| Project Manager | €600 to €800 | 15 to 20% |
| UX / UI Designer | €550 to €800 | 15 to 25% |
| E-commerce SEO Consultant | €600 to €850 | 5 to 10% |
Fixed-price project
The most common model for a Plus project. The agency commits to a defined scope, a schedule, and a firm price. The advantage for the brand is budgetary predictability. The downside is rigidity: anything outside the scope triggers an addendum. A fixed price therefore requires serious upfront framing, usually billed at €3,000 to €8,000 for the discovery phase.
Time and materials (T&M)
The agency bills for days consumed, without a commitment to a specific outcome for a fixed scope. This model suits brands with an internal team capable of steering and prioritizing. It is less suitable for brands new to Shopify Plus: without strong internal arbitration, consumption can quickly get out of hand.
Monthly retainer
A volume of days reserved each month, generally 4 to 15 days, or €2,500 to €12,000 monthly. This is the post-launch model: continuous improvements, conversion optimization, B2B ramp-up. We systematically recommend it for the six months following a Plus migration, because this is the period when adjustment needs are most intense.
The 6 factors that make quotes vary
For a seemingly identical scope, two Plus projects can vary by as much as three times. Here are the six variables that explain almost all of the difference, with their impact in days.
1. Catalog volume and structure. A catalog of 300 simple products can be migrated in 3 to 5 days. A catalog of 15,000 products with multiple variants, metafields, and market-specific renditions requires 15 to 30 days for data preparation, mapping, and verification.
2. ERP or PIM integrations. The most frequently underestimated item. A connection via a marketplace connector costs 5 to 10 days. A custom integration with bidirectional synchronization of inventory, prices, and orders costs 20 to 45 days, and depends heavily on the quality of the counterpart system's APIs.
3. Multi-markets. Each additional market with its language, currency, taxation, and shipping rules adds 4 to 8 days. Markets configuration is quick, but content translation and tax validation are much less so.
4. Checkout customization. Minor adaptations via standard extensions represent 3 to 6 days. Real conditional logic, with branches based on customer profile, discount rules via Functions, and custom fields, can go up to 12 to 25 days. This is one of the rare areas where agency experience truly changes the estimate, because poor approaches result in costly reworks.
5. B2B. Allow 15 to 30 days for a serious implementation of the native channel. This item increases if price lists come from an ERP and need to remain synchronized, or if the brand simultaneously operates a B2C channel on the same store.
6. Data migration. Importing customers and orders from Shopify takes 2 to 4 days. The same import from Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud, with history, B2B accounts, and multiple addresses, requires 10 to 25 days and a dedicated testing phase.
Recurring costs not to forget
The build quote is only part of the total cost of ownership. Here's what you need to budget for a full year after launch, excluding the platform license.
| Recurring Item | Observed Annual Budget | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Corrective and evolutionary maintenance | €12,000 to €45,000 | Depending on the number of days reserved in the retainer |
| Third-party enterprise applications | €3,000 to €12,000 | Billed by publishers, outside agency quote |
| Monitoring and supervision | €1,000 to €4,000 | Performance and error tracking tools |
| Functional enhancements | €15,000 to €50,000 | New features, testing, continuous optimization |
The rule of thumb we apply in budgetary framing: budget 25 to 40% of the build cost for the first year of operation. A brand investing €60,000 in a project should plan for €15,000 to €24,000 over the following twelve months. This is the item most often overlooked by brands, and it determines whether the site continues to progress or stagnates six months after launch.
Plus agency or standard Shopify agency: is the difference justified?
A certified Shopify Plus agency generally charges 15 to 30% more than a generalist Shopify agency for an equivalent scope. Here's our honest take on the matter, even when it doesn't play in our favor.
The extra cost is justified in three cases. First, when the project involves Checkout Extensibility or Shopify Functions: these are components where architectural errors cost more than savings on the daily rate. Second, for an enterprise migration, where mastery of the redirect plan and data recovery directly impacts post-launch revenue. Third, for a B2B project, because the modeling of catalogs and price lists is an area where real experience immediately shows.
The extra cost is not justified in two cases. If the project is a standard B2C site without checkout customization or B2B, a good generalist Shopify agency will do equivalent work for less. And if the brand does not yet have functional needs that require Plus, the real question is not the choice of agency but the choice of plan. We say this in meetings when applicable, even if it means reducing the scope of our own involvement.
Regarding what the Partner certification truly guarantees, and what it does not prove, our article Shopify Plus agency vs. Shopify agency delves into the question of the label. For a non-Plus project, our page how much a Shopify agency costs provides standard market ranges.
How to read and compare three quotes
When a brand consults us, it generally has two other quotes on the table. Here's the analytical framework we recommend, including for evaluating our own.
Convert everything to human-days. A global price tells you nothing. A €70,000 quote describing 90 days and a €70,000 quote describing 130 days are not offering the same thing: either the rates differ, or one of them underestimated the workload. Always ask for a breakdown by phase and by profile.
Check the items no one likes to quote. Testing, data recovery, team training, and post-launch support. A quote that omits these is not cheaper; it's incomplete. These four items represent 15 to 25% of a properly framed Plus project.
Look out for elastic phrasing. "ERP integration" without a system name or flow description, "checkout customization" without detail on rules, "catalog migration" without volume. Each of these phrases can hide a threefold difference in the actual workload.
- Red flag: a Plus quote without an identified framing phase. This means the scope was guessed.
- Red flag: an enterprise migration timeline announced under 8 weeks. Technically possible, commercially unverifiable.
- Red flag: no mention of the SEO redirect plan on a migration. This is the item whose oversight is most costly after launch.
- Red flag: a maintenance package announced without an associated volume of days.
- Good sign: the agency tells you under what conditions the project is not worthwhile.
One last piece of advice, valid for all quotes received: ask for three references of Plus projects comparable to yours, with a budgetary ballpark. An agency that has genuinely delivered these projects will respond in five minutes. The complete selection criteria can be found in our guide Shopify Partner, missions and costs.
Frequently asked questions
Quote for your Shopify Plus project
We are a certified Shopify Plus Partner agency and each year we frame creation, migration, and B2B implementation projects on the platform. If you have a project to budget or quotes to arbitrate, we can give you a reasoned range in one meeting. Let's talk about your project.